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Respectful Insolence is a repository for the ramblings of the aforementioned pseudonymous surgeon/scientist concerning medicine and quackery, science and pseudoscience, history and pseudohistory, politics, and anything else that interests him (or pushes his buttons). Orac's motto: "A statement of fact cannot be insolent." (OK, maybe it can be just a little bit insolent.)

Science at its finest

You know all those paranoid conspiracy theorists? You know how they're sometimes mocked for wearing tinfoil hats to prevent alien or government mind control rays from getting to them. Did you ever wonder if there was anything to that? Did you ever wonder whether those tinfoil hats work?

Ali Rahami at MIT did, and he did some experiments to see what the effect of aluminum foil hats on the absorption of radio waves is. He even tested three different designs of hats. Here are his conclusions:

The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ''radio location'' (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites (see, for example, [3]). The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations.

It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.

Now that's some science answering a practical question! (I particularly love the last line, which is so typical of scientific papers.) I'm guessing a corrollary of this work is that aluminum foil hats probably don't protect you against the dreaded cell phone radio waves that are purported to cause all sorts of horrible brain tumors.

So, there you go. Those folks railing against government mind control may be using defective equipment to protect themselves from the Illuminati, ZOG, and the U.N. with its black helicopters, ironically tricked by the very forces they are trying to protect themselves against. New designs are clearly needed immediately! Kudos to Dr. Rahimi for providing some desperately needed data to the conspiracy theory crowd! If he doesn't win an IgNobel Prize next year for his important work, you'll know the government (or the Masons or the Illuminati or. . .someone) got to him and hushed it up.

However, in the interests of scientific rigor and presenting criticisms of Dr. Rahimi's experimental design, it should be pointed out that his findings have been questioned by at least one person:

First and foremost, Rahimi et al. only considered simple radio frequencies. As I explained in detail in chapter 4 ("Psychotronic and AFDB Theory") of my book [2], only psychotronic energy can affect the brain in any coherent manner. Simple EM fields have only trivial effects -- such as causing indistinct sensations of a supernatural presence [3] -- over short distances. Only by converting electromagnetic energy into psychotronic energy using a psychotron-based device can the forces of mind control access from afar the neural network of a brain to both implant and extract thought complexes.

Perhaps Mr. Zapato would be willing to provide a device that would produce this "psychotronic energy" for more rigorous testing. Another criticism:

There's another odd discrepancy in their procedure description: While they say that the test helmets were made of Reynolds aluminum foil, in the lower left of Fig. 2 ("B" in enhanced version above) one can clearly see a box of Chef's Pride brand foil on their work bench next to the completed helmets. Well, Rahimi et al., which is it?

Personally, I'm not sure that the above would be a valid criticism, even if true, although using different brands could introduce unwanted variability in the results. And finally:

The "current helmet craze" may indeed have been propagated by government forces, but that has nothing to do with the effectiveness of AFDBs or their non-crazed use by sensible paranoids. It is a common MO of the NWO and allied conspirators to disingenuously promote that which they aspire to destroy. The current rise in joking references to AFDBs -- which is what Rahimi et al. are referring to by "the current helmet craze" -- is most likely a calculated ploy to scare off would be paranoids from the mental protection of foil. That the forces of mind control are bothering to do this is itself evidence of the effectiveness of AFDBs.

The most important question raised by the Rahimi et al. study is: Should paranoids trust people working for an organization deeply involved in the Military-Industrial Complex? While Rahimi, the lead investigator whose site the paper is hosted on, is from MIT's EE and CS departments, the et al. (Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, and Noah Vawter) are from MIT's notorious Media Lab, which receives funding from DARPA [4] -- one of those government agencies they pretend to be concerned about. When it comes to mind control, they are hardly an unbiased party. That, combined with the aforementioned discrepancies and questionable procedures, makes their conclusions highly suspect.

Clearly more research is needed, although it would appear to me that MIT would be exactly the folks who could answer this important question. Maybe these designs could be adapted to protect the brain against both government mind control waves and cell phone emissions...

Orac is but a humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will. That Orac has chosen his pseudonym based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights from an old British SF show whose special effects were renowned for their early 1980's BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction for television ever produced, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.) Orac tries to keep his insolence respectful, but admittedly sometimes fails in the cases of obvious quackery and pseudoscience, attacks on him, very poor critical thinking skills, bigotry, and just general plain stupidity.